Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 6. Whole No. 766, June 2005

The Jury Box by Jon L. Breen

The Edgar winner for best first novel of 2002, Rebecca Pawel’s Death of a Nationalist, an historical novel set in post-Civil War Spain, was one of the finest debuts of recent years, all the more remarkable from a writer in her mid twenties. In The Law of Return (2003), she continued the saga of Guardia Lieutenant Carlos Tejada, a good guy on the bad (i.e. Fascist) side, and his unlikely romance with a schoolteacher of Republican (i.e. Communist) sympathies. Now a third entry upholds the high standard of its predecessors.

**** Rebecca Pawel: The Watcher in the Pine, Soho, $24. In spring 1941, Carlos and Elena, married and expecting a child, arrive at his new posting in the war-ravaged town of Potes, where his predecessor was murdered and bandits menace the Guardias. While you may more easily identify with Elena, very mildly feminist by current standards, Tejada and a local priest are made sympathetic despite attitudes today’s readers will find antiquated at best, repellent at worst. Traditionalists note: Pawel honors the detective form with fair-play clues.

*** Ruth Rendell: The Rottweiler, Crown, $25. The title refers to the inaccurate name the London press (to the vocal distress of Rottweiler breeders) gives a serial garroter of young women who doesn’t bite his victims as rumored but steals a small object from each of them. The investigation comes to center on an antique shop, its widowed proprietor, her beautiful sexually manipulative salesclerk, and her upstairs lodgers, an interestingly varied if increasingly depressing lot. Disappointingly, the tantalizing whodunit is discarded before the one-third point, leaving only a psychological whydunit that might have been more intriguing before the market was flooded with serial killers, but consummate novelist Rendell can always keep you reading. (One significant plot strand depends on sirens on emergency vehicles sounding the same in Britain as in the United States, which the last I heard they did not.)

*** Joan Lowery Nixon: Laugh Till You Cry, Delacorte, $15.95. The final book by Nixon, who died in 2003, demonstrates why she won four Edgars for her juvenile mysteries. Thirteen-year-old Cody Carter, an aspiring California comedy writer transplanted to Houston because of his grandmother’s illness, must confront a bullying cousin and school bomb threats. His use of a classroom project on Hamlet to advance his case is inspired.Mary Higgins Clark’s introduction pays tribute to the much-admired author.

*** Maddy Hunter: Pasta Imperfect, Pocket, $6.50. Iowa travel escort Emily Andrew, her senior-citizen charges, and her transsexual ex-husband are touring Italy with a band of romance writers, editors, and cutthroat-competitive wannabes when a series of accidental deaths (yeah, right) befall the travelers. Comedy trumps mystery, as in so many contemporary series, but the comedy (whether situational or satirical, character-driven or wisecrack-driven) is first-rate. My cozy consultant advises that the series predecessor, the Ireland-based Top of the Mournin’ (2003), is even better.

*** Robert S. Levinson: Ask a Dead Man, Five Star, $23.95. In a pre-9/11 world, double-agent KC McClory travels from Belfast to Pasadena to avenge the death of her Irish-terrorist husband, protect her American adopted family, and prevent the assassination of a visiting African leader. While you may not believe all the characters and their relationships, Levinson’s story structure, eye for detail, flavorsome style, and knack for Hitchcockian suspense set pieces cannot be denied.

*** John McEvoy: Blind Switch, Poisoned Pen, $24.95. Jack Doyle’s one-shot employment as a race-fixer at a Chicago track leads to an FBI undercover operation investigating mysterious thoroughbred deaths at the Kentucky farm of a pernicious publishing mogul. Flaws include excessive back-story and a Roadrunner-ish slapstick subplot, but the former Daily Racing Form correspondent’s style, wit, and inside knowledge of racing, breeding, and betting chicanery fuel a fine entertainment.

** Anne Perry: Long Spoon Lane, Ballantine, $25.95. Anarchist bombings and a Parliamentary proposal to arm the police and trample on civil liberties strain the social fabric of 1890s London, but Thomas Pitt, helped by wife Charlotte and extended family, is on the case. Perry can still draw you in, but this series has declined alarmingly with increasing doses of soap opera and the sinister Inner Circle.

** Michael Koryta: Tonight I Said Goodbye, St. Martin’s Minotaur/Dunne, $21.95. A World War II veteran hires Cleveland private eyes Lincoln Perry and Joe Pritchard to prove the death of his son was not suicide but murder and to find out what happened to his son’s vanished wife and daughter. While this competent debut is outrageously over-hyped in the back-jacket blurbs, its talented 21-year-old author clearly has a bright future.

For a reminder of Dorothy L. Sayers’s transcendence as puzzle-spinner and observer of her times, try the unabridged audiobook of her 1936 novel Gaudy Night (Audio Partners, $39.95), masterfully read by Ian Carmichael. The problem of a serial trickster at an Oxford women’s college, illuminating issues of feminism and scholarship, shares the spotlight with the slowly developing romance of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane in a novel that shows today’s writers how to make a long book justify its thickness: more matter. Also recommended are DVDs of the excellent early-’70s BBC productions of five Wimsey novels starring Carmichael, ideally cast albeit a little old for the role: The Unpleasantness of the Bellona Club, The Nine Tailors, Murder Must Advertise, Five Red Herrings, and Clouds of Witness, available individually ($39.95 each) or in a boxed set ($149.95) from Acorn Media.

A welcome new trade-paper reprinting of the humorous Asey Mayo series by Sayers’s very different contemporary, Phoebe Atwood Taylor, is kicked off by her 1931 first novel, The Cape Cod Mystery (Countryman, $10.95).

The first seven issues of a new mystery fanzine, Give Me That Old-Time Detection, include previously published articles from such familiar bylines as Marvin Lachman, Steven Steinbock (on EQ), and Susan Oleksiw, plus new material by editor Arthur Vidro and others. Some of the subject authors in the latest issue include Agatha Christie, Stuart Palmer, Margery Allingham, Cornell Woolrich, E.C. Bentley, Wilkie Collins, and Jack Ritchie. The contents are knowledgeable, well-written, and intelligent, the last being a given since it is the official publication of a Mensa special interest group. Sample copies ($3 each) and subscriptions (one year of three issues $7.50 for Mensa members, $9 for others, $5 additional for overseas subscriptions) are available from the editor at P.O. Box 313, Williston Park, New York 11596-0313. Checks should be made payable to Arthur Vidro.